Amalfi Coast Terraced Landscape

Where it sits. The Costiera Amalfitana is the southern flank of the Sorrentine Peninsula in the province of Salerno — about fifty kilometres of coast running east from Positano to Vietri sul Mare, where the mountains finally release and the plain toward Salerno begins. The Lattari range comes down to the water at gradients that regularly exceed sixty per cent, so every settlement occupies either a ravine mouth, a rock ledge or a terrace cut by hand. Thirteen comuni share the coast: Positano, Praiano, Furore, Conca dei Marini, Amalfi, Atrani, Ravello, Scala, Minori, Maiori, Tramonti, Cetara and Vietri. UNESCO inscribed the whole strip as a cultural landscape in 1997, on the grounds that the terracing and the town fabric represent an exceptional adaptation of settlement to impossible terrain.

The road. Before 1854 these villages were reached by sea. The Strada Statale 163, nicknamed the Nastro Azzurro, was cut into the cliffs between 1832 and 1854 under Bourbon rule and remains one of the great engineering achievements of nineteenth-century Italy: 45 kilometres of two-lane road at an average of 100 metres above the water, with more than a hundred bends, a series of stone viaducts, and a width in several places that will not admit two coaches simultaneously. It is also the source of every practical problem here. Buses reverse to let each other pass; the drive from Positano to Amalfi, sixteen kilometres, takes forty minutes on a good day and two hours in August. Traffic restrictions by number plate operate in high season, and ferries are usually faster than driving between any two coastal towns.

On screen. The coast has been supplying film-makers with landscape they cannot build since the 1950s. John Huston brought Beat the Devil (1953) here with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Peter Lorre, basing the unit at Ravello and shooting in the town and down at Amalfi. The production is legendary for having begun without a finished script: Truman Capote was flown in and wrote pages each night for the following morning's shooting, and Bogart, who was also co-financing, was badly injured in a car accident on the coast road during the shoot, losing teeth and several weeks. Sixty-six years later Christopher Nolan used the same water for Tenet (2020), staging the yacht sequence that the film places in Vietnam off this coastline with a base again at Ravello. In between, the SS163 has carried an unbroken procession of chases and convertibles, and the terraced towns have doubled for generic Mediterranean anywhere in dozens of productions.

What the landscape actually is. The famous lemons are a crop, not decoration. The sfusato amalfitano, a long tapered lemon with thick, sweet-smelling rind, is grown on terraces held up by dry-stone walls called macere, shaded by chestnut-pole pergolas, and carried down by hand or on cableways; the fruit goes to limoncello and to the table. Above Amalfi, water-powered mills made paper from the thirteenth century using rags rather than wood pulp — the bambagina — and the Museo della Carta in a surviving mill still demonstrates the process. Behind it the Valle delle Ferriere nature reserve preserves a humid microclimate where Woodwardia radicans, a giant fern surviving from the Tertiary period, still grows wild. Vietri sul Mare at the eastern end has made painted ceramics since the Middle Ages and supplies most of the tiles you see on domes and stair risers along the coast.

Walking it. The best of the coast is above the road. The Sentiero degli Dei, the Path of the Gods, runs about 7.8 kilometres from Bomerano in Agerola to Nocelle above Positano at between 500 and 650 metres, on a mule track with almost continuous sea views and a long staircase at the end; walked westbound it is mostly downhill and takes three to four hours. Other routes climb from Amalfi to Pontone and the ruined Torre dello Ziro, from Minori to Ravello on the Sentiero dei Limoni, and from Praiano up to the Convento di San Domenico. Between Praiano and Furore the Fiordo di Furore, a slot inlet spanned by a road bridge, is the only true fjord-shaped cove in the region; at Conca dei Marini the Grotta dello Smeraldo is a sea cave lit green through a submerged opening.

Getting there and timing. The nearest airport is Naples, ninety minutes from Amalfi by road on a clear day. The practical approach is the Circumvesuviana train to Sorrento and then a ferry, or a train to Salerno and a ferry west. Ferries run roughly April to October only. May and late September give warm water, open boats and manageable roads; July and August combine peak heat with peak traffic. Winter is genuinely closed — most hotels and many restaurants shut between November and Easter.